Reaching the Privacy-Conscious: How Pearson Captured the Untapped Audience in Education

Lifelong learning company Pearson has recently taken advantage of Opt Out Advertising’s consentless network with great success.

Pearson wanted to reach students who were in the market researching BETC Higher Nationals, and consentless inventory delivered phenomenal click-through rates for this campaign. Here’s why:

• The campaign did not use personal data to target the most relevant audience. Instead, we focused on context to great effect, serving ads on the education pages of national news websites.

• For some brands, the audience can be varied, and for Pearson, there might be parents also engaging with the education pages on behalf of their early adult children. If the campaign had only honed in on students who had given consent to their data, then this additional audience may have been lost. There can be downsides to over-targeting!

• We were confident that the education pages were specific enough to make the advertising work hard and reach the correct audience without any need to identify individuals from their data consent.

The Click-Through Rate was at the top of the benchmark, and the campaign had high visibility with a view rate above 80%. The performance results of the first campaign led to a rebooking straight away, which speaks for itself!

Ross Wallace, Head of Performance at Pearson’s media agency December19, said:

"With more and more students aware of their online privacy, Pearson jumped at the opportunity to reach students who did not want their data used for advertising but were still in market researching BTEC Higher Nationals, as an alternative to traditional university reading relevant articles on The Guardian and Telegraph. This gave us an opportunity to influence students that other BTEC Higher Nationals were not reaching."

In summary, Pearson wanted to reach students and realized that they would miss out on a large portion of the audience if they only focused on consented inventory. They also wanted to reach the privacy-aware, so it was a no-brainer for Pearson to embrace consentless inventory via Opt Out Advertising.